The present invention relates generally to a communication system. More specifically, the present invention relates to interference cancellation with a communication system.
Wireless communications systems commonly employ direct sequence/code division multiple access (DS/CDMA). In practice, DS/CDMA typically provides a greater system capacity than many alternative approaches, such as time division multiple access (TDMA) and frequency division multiple access (FDMA). Nonetheless, demand for wireless communication services is projected to exceed the capacity provided by known DS/CDMA systems. Thus, new approaches may be required to satisfy the increasing demand, to maintain a high Quality of Service (QoS) and to avoid rising prices due to system complexity. One such new approach is DS/CDMA with multiuser detection (MUD).
Known MUD techniques for DS/CDMA systems that employ long spreading sequences (e.g., IS-95 and IS-2000) are successive interference cancellation (SIC) and parallel interference cancellation (PIC) schemes. See, e.g., Viterbi, A., “Very Low Rate Convolutional Codes for Maximum Theoretical Performance of Spread-Spectrum Multiple-Access Channel,”IEEE JSAC, Vol. 8, No. 4, May 1990, pp. 641-649; U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,105,435, 5,218,619, 5,579,304, 5,894,500, 6,002,727 and 6,014,373; which describe SIC and which are all incorporated herein by reference. See also, e.g., Yoon, Y. C., Kohno, R., and Imai, H., “Cascaded co-channel interference canceling and diversity combining for spread-spectrum multi-access over multipath fading channels,” Symposium on Information Theory and Its Applications, September 1992; U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,644,592 and 6,067,333; and Patel, P., and Holtzman, “Performance Comparison of a DS/CDMA System using a Successive Cancellation (IC) Scheme and a Parallel IC Scheme Under Fading,” ICC, May 1994; which describe PIC and which are all incorporated herein by reference. PIC and SIC typically can be simpler to implement than linear MUD techniques because they do not require an estimate of the cross-correlation between users or matrix inversions. Furthermore, PIC can be generally advantageous over SIC when the set of user signal-to-noise ratios (SNR's) has a small variance as is the case on the reverse link of IS-95, which employs power control. See, e.g., Buehrer, R. M., Correal, N. S., and Woemer R. D., “A Comparison of Multiuser Receivers for Cellular CDMA,” IEEE Globecom 1996, Vol. 3, pp. 1571-1577.
Known PIC schemes can be implemented using several stages. The first stage can consist of a set of conventional receivers each matched to a particular user (e.g., a user associated with a particular CDMA code for a particular information channel). The output of each conventional receiver can be either the most likely sequence or the most likely symbols transmitted by the user given the received waveform and ignoring interference caused by other users. After the first stage, an estimate of each of the user's transmission can be regenerated using the most likely sequence or symbols. An interference-reduced waveform can be then created for each user by subtracting all of the other user regenerated signals from the original received signal. The interference-reduced waveform can be then processed by a conventional receiver in the second stage, generating a new most likely sequence or set of most likely symbols for each user. These estimates can be used to regenerate new signals and the above process is repeated in subsequent stages.
In the formation of the interference-reduced waveform by these known systems, each of the regenerated signals is multiplied by a scaling factor that can be determined in one of two ways. First, in a hard-decision PIC (HD-PIC) scheme (described in Yoon et al.), each regenerated waveform is simply multiplied by an estimate of the complex amplitude associated with a particular user (e.g., obtained by such methods as multipath combiners or single-user correlators followed by hard decision devices). The result of this multiplication is then subtracted from the original received signal. Second, in a partial PIC (P-PIC) scheme (described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,644,592), each regenerated waveform is multiplied by an estimate of the complex amplitude and a predetermined factor between 0 and 1 that is fixed for all users in a particular PIC cancellation stage but may vary from stage-to-stage.
HD-PIC and P-PIC schemes both suffer the drawback that even if a symbol decision made for a particular user is unreliable, all or a significant part of the regenerated signal for that user is still subtracted from the received waveform to form the input to the next stage. Consequently, when a symbol decision is incorrect, this subtraction significantly degrades the receiver performance.